Top Pete Docter Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Pete Docter Biography

Peter Hans Docter (born October 9, 1968) is an American film director, animator, screenwriter, producer and voice actor from Bloomington, Minnesota. He is best known for directing the animated feature films Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009) and Inside Out (2015) and as a key figure and collaborator at Pixar Animation Studios. The A.V. Club has called him "almost universally successful". He has been nominated for eight Oscars (two wins thus far for Up and Inside Out – Best Animated Feature), seven Annie Awards (winning five), a BAFTA Children's Film Award (which he won), and a Hochi Film Award (which he won). He has described himself as a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons."

Read about Pete Docter in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Pete Docter Quotes

The idea kind of started with me just thinking about what would be fun to see in animation, you know - what have I not seen? For some reason, I got thinking about the human body and realizing, well, I've seen, like, traveling through the bloodstream and into the, you know, stomach and things.

Fun, Ideas, Kind, Like, Seen, Thinking

And it's about a three-month process every screening. And that way we have seven or eight chances at the film before we have to actually build the models, build the sets, do the animation and all of that. So it's a - I think that's a real key to the way we make films.

Build, Film, Keys, Real, Seven, Thinking

But the truth is, at some point, our films - almost every single one of them - are really bad. And it's largely hats off to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull who have set up a system whereby they're expecting it.

Film, Hats, Largely, Set, Truth, Truth Is

And usually I'm not watching the screen. I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to' cause it's - as Joe Ranft used to say, you know, animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs

Cause, Joe, Laughing, People, Used, Years

And in part that's good but then, like any emotion - and this is something we learned from the research as well - there are positive and negative aspects to all of these.

Aspects, Emotion, Negative, Research

And it sort of hit me that the very subject matter of the film that I'm dealing with is the key to the most important thing in our lives, and that's our relationships. And so we had done all this research showing the job of each individual emotion, you know, fear keeps you safe. It deals with uncertainty.

Deals, Hit, Important, Jobs, Keys, Sort

You know there's always that kid in your class — and every class has one — the kid who draws all the time and is really good? That was not me. I was a lousy draftsman. But as soon as I figured out that I could make things come alive, like using the corners of my math book to make flipbooks, I was hooked.

Book, Kids, Make, Math, Time

Anger is about fairness. If it feels that you're getting ripped off or taken advantage of, that's when anger comes up. Sadness deals with loss. And I suddenly had this new revelation - it felt like to me - that those are all true, but the real, deeper reason we have emotions is to connect us together. And that felt big to me.

Connect, Felt, Real, Ripped, Sadness, Taken

It's, like, you know, if you're sad, it's a way of connecting with other people. And we - a lot of times we sort of feel embarrassed by being sad, and we go off by ourselves to hide and cry by ourselves. But, really, it's a way of re-establishing relationship.

Being Sad, People, Relationship, Times, Way

Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film.

Cutting, Drawing, Film, Music, Writing

Traditionally, animation has been dominated by men in the past. I don't know why it attracted guys.

Animation, Attracted, Dominated, Guy, Men, Past

My father was working on his Ph. D. on Danish choral music - the Danish choral music of Carl Nielsen - so over there to do research.

Danish, Father, Music, Research, Working

Dr. Paul Ekman, who worked in San Francisco - still does - which is where Pixar Animation Studios is, he had early in his career identified six. That felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise.

Design, Early, Guys, Nice, Sadness, Writing

I mean, I've - these other films were flukes. I don't know what I'm doing. I should just quit. What would I miss? I'd miss my house and I'd miss going to work. But I think the thing that I realized I would miss most is probably similar to everybody, which is your friends.

House, Mean, Miss, Thing, Thinking

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

Globe, Ideas, Memories, Real, Snow, Way

Yeah, to bring families together I need to go away.

Away, Going Away, Needs, Together, Yeah

We actually needed the memory - if you see the film - as a very different kind of a plot device of revealing some information to our main character. So we chose to represent it as these sort of beautiful little snow globes, which kind of, weirdly, that's the way we think of memories - at least, most of the folks that we talked to. You think of these memories as being very pure and absolute and unchanging. That's not actually real life.

Beautiful, Character, Memories, Plot, Real, Talked

Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible.

Bottle, Childhood, Children, Hold, Purity, Purity And Innocence

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.

Cases, Memories, People, Taken, Things

Any great movie you watch has some element of darkness or loss or some suffering in it. That's what makes the fun parts fun.

Darkness, Element, Fun, Loss, Suffering, Watch

1